Which people of which ethnic group are especially attractive to each other? In multi-ethnic Metro Vancouver, this is a subject that’s increasingly being hotly discussed as inter-radical dating and marriage continues to grow. The results are surprising. While Census Canada has some useful data on this sort of thing, psychologists at Cardiff University in Wales have gone the extra step and actually tried to pin down inter-ethnic preferences.

Who do white women prefer?

The Cardiff researchers discovered that white women (in Britain at least) opt first for black males, followed by whites and then Asians.

White men, on the other hand, tend to first prefer Asian women. That was followed by white women, then black.
This study and others are recounted in The Asian Pacific Post, which can be found here.Unfortunately, the story doesn’t report any data on who non-whites prefer to look for to date or marry. As the articles listed at the bottom of this posting suggest, this can a senstive and explosive topic.

Still, there is some data on non-white preferences. It’s intriguing to note that non-white women in Canada are far more inclined than non-white men to enter into mixed-race partnerships. That suggests there is a special openness among visible minority women to trying someone new.

The Asian Pacific Post reports that Japanese-Canadians are the most likely in the country to get into mixed-race partnerships — with three out of four doing so.

Here’s an excerpt from the Post, which explains further:

“Japanese in Canada had the highest proportion marrying or partnering outside of their visible minority group, as shown in the 2006 Census….

“Indeed, about three-quarters (75%) of the 29,700 couples where at least one person in the couple was Japanese involved pairings with a non-Japanese person.

“Latin Americans (47%) and Blacks (41%) followed Japanese with the highest proportions of couples involving out-group pairings.

“About one-third of couples involving a Filipino (33%) were married or living common-law outside their visible minority group.

“The proportions of mixed unions among Southeast Asians (31%), Arabs or West Asians (25%) or Koreans (19%) ranked somewhat in the middle of all visible minority groups.

“Filipino, Korean, Southeast Asian, Japanese, Chinese or Latin American women in couples accounted for a higher proportion of spouses or partners in mixed unions than did men from these visible minority groups.

“There were more than three times as many married or partnered Filipino women in mixed unions (28%) as there were Filipino men (9%). For Japanese, nearly two-thirds of Japanese women in couples were in mixed unions while this was the case for over one-half (52%) of men from this visible minority group.”